The Professor and His Mac Tattoo

Share

The Professor and His Mac Tattoo

Some unlikely people get Apple tattoos.

Christof Koch, a professor of Computation and Neural Systems at the renowned California Institute of Technology and head of the Koch Laboratory, has a small rainbow-colored Apple logo tattooed on his right arm.

"I always wanted a tattoo and I really love the Mac," Koch said. "There are very few artifacts that are so perfectly suited to their environment, that blend form and function. The Mac is like a perfectly designed organism."

Koch is one of the world's leading neuroscientists. He and Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick have teamed up to search for the neurological seat of consciousness, a philosophically contentious endeavor that has yielded some surprising results.

A couple of years ago, Koch claimed to have found brain cells dedicated to recognizing Bill Clinton. The finding suggests the existence of the hitherto-elusive "grandmother cell": a neuron tuned to recognizing your grandmother.

Before Koch's discovery, most cognitive scientists believed that higher-order functions like recognizing faces were conducted by large, complex networks of neurons, not individual cells. "There are grandmother neurons," Koch said, "even if people don't like the idea."

Koch got his Apple tattoo a couple of years ago while on a summer archeological dig in Israel with his 18-year-old son, Alexander, who pestered him to take him to a tattoo parlor.

Koch eventually relented, but when they got there, his son couldn't decide what to get. On impulse, Koch decided to get an Apple tattoo – but the tattoo artist didn't know what it looked like. "If you just want an American corporate logo, we can give you the (McDonald's) Golden Arches," Koch was told.

Koch found a computer magazine at a nearby newsstand, and it contained the Apple logo. The tattoo artist "did a perfect job, it really looks good," Koch said.

His wife didn't think so, evidently. "She does not like tattoos," Koch said. "That's why I had to get it done in Israel."

His son didn't like it either. "He thought it looked too whimsical," Koch said. "He wanted something more serious. If you're 18 years old, it's important to look serious and tough. But once you're 44, you don't need that image any more."

Koch was surprised to learn he is not the only person with an Apple tattoo and that there are dozens of others. "It's pretty crazy," he said. "There's a whole community of us.